PREVIEW: OCZ’s RevoDrive 400 Looks Like a Great SSD

Ever since the company got acquired by Toshiba, OCZ Storage Solutions focused on more performance for the enthusiasts and expanding the market share in the fast-growing segment of enterprise storage. On CES 2016, OCZ introduced several new products, basing them on NVMe PCI Express Gen 3 standard. For the enthusiasts, OCZ launched RevoDrive 400 Series.

Unlike RevoDrive 350 (which featured non-removable memory on the add-in PCIe card), the all-new RevoDrive 400 now comes as an M.2 form factor product with an additional PCIe x4 add-in card – very similar to Kingston’s HyperX Predator. By moving to M.2 form factor, RevoDrive 400 can now be installed not just in desktop, but in laptops as well – and storage speed offered by a majority of notebooks leaves a lot to be desired for. That goes for workstations too, since a ThinkPad workstation notebook we recently tested didn’t exactly feature a high-performance M.2 drive.

OCZ RevoDrive 400 is a brand new product for OCZ and marks entrance into the fast-growing NVMe / M.2 market.

RevoDrive 400 will come to market in 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1TB capacity, enabled by Toshiba’s most advanced MLC NAND Flash memory. Using the brand-new 15nm process, Toshiba can now pack 1TB in M.2 form factor and not sacrifice any speed. While OCZ is officially quoting Sequential read is quoted being ‘up to 2,400 MB/s’, and sequential write at ‘up to 1,500 MB/s,’ initial benchmarks show the product can exceed the factory spec.

Given that we saw motherboards with up to three M.2 slots, it should be interesting to see just how fast can a user make its storage subsystem. While OCZ has not released the price of RevoDrive 400 Series, previous versions were quite competitive against Intel 750 Series or Kingston HyperX ($/GB).

Judging by the initial performance numbers, RevoDrive is looking to impress. The 512 GB version comes with 476.94 GB of formatted capacity, and 64-bit version of CrystalDiskMark Sequential Q32TR1 test finished with 2.6 GB/s read and 1.56 GB/s write, higher than factory spec. ATTO DiskBenchmark reported even faster, 2.63 GB/s for read and 1.58 GB/s write speed. Thus, we would not be surprised if the final RevoDrive 400 specifications end up being higher than on CES spec sheets.

All in all, an impressive unit, and we hope to see the final production unit working as good as the initial prototype.